Google LLC is officially rolling out Android 13 today and pushed the source code into the Android Open Source Project for developers.

The new mobile operating system release is replete with new features and apps that Google’s Android team has been developing for the past months. They’re aimed at user privacy and security, superior developer control, language settings, productivity and media options.

Android 13 will be rolling out to Pixel devices today. Later this year, it will also become available on other devices, including Samsung Galaxy, Asus, Motorola, Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi, Nokia phones and more.

“Android 13 helps ensure your devices feel unique to you – on your terms,” Sameer Samat, vice president of Product at Android and Play said in a blog post. “It comes jam-packed with new capabilities for your phone and tablet, like extending app color theming to even more apps, language settings that can be set on an app level, improved privacy controls and even the ability to copy text and media from one Android device and paste it to another with just a click.”

Look and feel in Android 13

The newly released Android 13 builds on Material You, a design element toolkit from Android 12 that streamlines display elements so they automatically adapt to the theme set by the user. Now all developers need to do is add a monochromatic app icon and it will adjust to fit the wallpaper or theme whenever users adjusts their displays.

App developers can now more easily support multilingual users via per-app language. It is possible to set the phone’s “official” language in Android’s system settings, but if users want to have an individual app localize to a specific language it is now possible to have them do so.

In keeping with language improvements, Android 13 includes enhancements to text such as faster hyphenation that makes it faster display by up to 200% and thus easier to read when it’s rendering. The Text conversion programming interfaces have also been improved to make searching and autocompletion faster when using phonetic lettering for languages such as Japanese, Chinese and others.

Privacy and security in Android 13

Privacy and security are tantamount in the new release by giving users a new way to access and share their media. The photo picker now extends Android’s document picker to make it easier for users to access photos and videos with an app but do so without giving the app broad access to all media files across the device.

As a result, the photo picker operates by only handing permissions to the specific media files that the user selected for the app. It is now available to users running Android 11 and higher with Google Play updates turned on.

To further security, Android 13 has introduced “notification permissions” that now require apps to request permission from the user before posting notifications. That’s aimed at helping declutter the user’s lock screen experience from numerous unnecessary notifications that crop up throughout their day.

Multi-device collaboration in Android 13

Most people use multiple devices to get their work done and now with Android 13 it’s even easier than ever to multitask between laptops, tablets and Chromebooks.

Users can now stream messaging apps directly from Android to a Chromebook so it’s possible to keep chatting after sitting down from the phone directly to a laptop. This includes Google Messages and many different types of messaging apps — no more dropping the phone on the desk and constantly glancing down as it beeps or buzzes.

With cross-device copy and paste, coming soon, it will be possible to copy a URL, a snippet of text or an image and move it from an Android phone to a tablet or vice versa, making it easier to work with both. That means form factor is no longer in the way of productivity.

Android 13 was built for tablets by extending the 12L update that expanded the operating system for large screens. Users will find it much easier to use across different form factors, including tablets, foldables and large devices, with navigation designed for large-screen layouts and improved computability.

Image: Google